MSCI Inc. (NYSE:MSCI) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Craig Huber: Great, thank you. I wanted to focus first if we could, on the recurring subscription part of your business in indexes. Obviously, the numbers continue to be extremely strong there. But maybe just talk a little further, if you would, about the sales cycles there, your sales pipeline client budgets? I mean, is there anything there that you’re feeling a little less positive about stuff, particularly sales cycle?

Andy Wiechmann: Yes. I would say you’ve actually seen remarkable strength on the index subscription business that we have with the index subscription revenue line. It’s been quite encouraging given the backdrop, to your point, where we’ve been having very constructive discussions within our more established client segments like asset owners and asset managers. And I mentioned we saw subscription run rate growth within that segment of 10%, which is quite healthy. And we’ve also seen – continue to see strong dialogue and engagement with hedge funds, wealth managers, broker-dealers, where we saw that elevated growth that I alluded to. Similarly, from a product lens standpoint, we are having strong momentum within our market cap modules.

So our market cap modules actually had strong growth of about 11% in subscription run rate. And we saw outsized growth within some of our non-market cap modules relative to that. And so across the board, we’ve seen a healthy dialogue and momentum. And it’s not only with these newer high-growth segments but doing more for existing clients. And so at this point, we haven’t seen a lot of impact from the environment, although we are conscious that the index segment tends to have a shorter sales cycle. And so there could be some impact. But right now, it’s overall a very, very healthy dialogue.

Craig Huber: Great. My follow-up question. you talked a lot about the enhancement you guys made in the analytics products. So I’d like to hear further on the fixed income side of things, what you guys are – the investor is spending to do in there, were you really focused on within the fixed income area, please?

Baer Pettit: Sure. So look, this has clearly been a multiyear effort where we have continuously improved everything that we’re doing, where we’ve had some important wins on fixed income in the last few quarters. And clearly, we can’t go into individual client names here because it’s not what we do. But we’re, I think, at a really important inflection point where we have some pretty significant deals in the pipeline, and those deals are ones which we hope if we can get a few of them done they should have really positive knock-on effects for our credibility in this asset class and then hopefully become kind of a virtuous circle. So I would say that, across the teams, people have never felt more positive than today about what we’re doing in fixed income.

As you know, this has not been a fast thing. This has been more of an oil tanker than a speed boat. But I really hope, and I think I’ve got good grounds for believing so, that during the course of this coming year, we should be able to really show that we’re making a lot of progress in fixed income and starting to win some pretty serious investors over to our fixed income analytics. So in short, I don’t think it’s one thing. I think it’s a compound over various sub asset classes in fixed income, different types of analytics. So it’s what we’re doing across the board. And I really do think we’re in a great place to have a strong year for 2023 in fixed income.

Craig Huber: Great. Thank you.

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